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Renting a bike in Mexico City
Theoretically, renting a bike in Mexico City as a tourist should be easy. In practice, it’s a bit of a pain (but follow me out). Mexicans with national cards can buy a year pass to ecobici for 400 pesos/21.26USD. As a tourist the rate is 300 pesos/15.95USD per week. In addition the weekly pass needs to…
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Pastelerías and bikes
My favorite way to get to know a city is on a bike. But Mexico City is so huge there’s no way – even if you lived here – to know even a fraction of its different neighbourhoods. It is large beyond imagination, and always changing. As a visitor I’m limited to narrow windows – but I’m always curious and travelling…
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Media versus reality
As the Aeromexico flight we’re on crosses the US-Mexican border I can feel a tangible change. Up until this invisible line there has been no deviation from a flight path: an arc out of Montreal and then a diagonal line towards Houston. As we cross the border flight attendants wheel a cart down the aisle full of free tequila…
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¿Why visit Mexico City?
Mexico City fills to overflowing a huge valley that even just a century ago was mostly a lake. Humans pulled the plug on the water and filled in the lake, spawning a huge city that combines new land butting up to old shoreline and islands. Like Damascus – the city my family came from – it’s…
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Blending in while sticking out
I think of myself as having grown up in Vermont, but there was a stint of four years when I also lived in Wallingford, Connecticut. It was the Sixties and Wallingford was a gritty industrial town outside of New Haven. It was home to a lot of Italians and also a big silver company. By the…
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Photography will never be the same
Over the last ten years it’s been hard not to be stunned by what’s happened to photography. Near my home is a billboard that’s pretty much owned by Apple. Recently it’s often been showing a simple black and white photo, credited to the current iPhone. To say that the smart phone market has shaken up traditional camera manufacturers…
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Fretting about Uber
I bought a shiny new camera last week. It weighs 180 grams, about a half the weight of my old Leica M4. For 29 years the Leica snuggled happily under my shoulder. Since 2002 – when I gave up using it – I’ve had a mottled succession of computer-cameras, their lifetimes proportional to their cost…
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Un moment commun
Marie visited a few days ago with her photos place-marked into How Many Roads? Not so many minutes after we started going over them we were laughing so hard we were almost crying. Our parents must have been so proud of us! Here she writes: Pourquoi ai-je été aussi touchée en voyant les photos de Jonathan? Elles…
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Minor White
From Fall, 1970 through the following June I was a student of Minor White’s. Though I was chronologically an undergraduate he placed me in his graduate program. It’s people from that class that you see in the circle above. If history is written by victors it also contains a good measure of current social mores. I was pleased to…
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The Other Hagop
I’ve been reading Paris 1919, a multi-threaded account of the six month period at the end of World War One when the French, British, and American leaders met in Paris to sort out the debris from the war and set the way forward. Nobody comes out looking too good. The author is a Canadian and the grand-daughter of Lloyd-George.…
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Hagop the optician
A large number of Armenians lived in Damascus, including this man with his two sons. I felt a connection to Hagop because his family endured the same Turkish/Ottoman exodus that had engulfed my mother’s side of the family. Added to that connection was his name – Hagop. It was the same as an elderly man who had been…
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